D.C. Journos Make ‘Em Laugh

The story from The Hamilton Thursday night is that young female journalists, especially those of color, are hilarious and killing it in this town.

While both the women and men who performed at the annual Commedia Dell Media event in front of 300 people had their moments of funny, the performers were quick, self-deprecating, laser-sharp, edgy and hilarious.

Normally, this type of merrymaking is saved for the Twittersphere, but once a year reporters get on stage to raise money for a charity, this year Writopia Lab, by potentially humiliating themselves. This year’s show was consistently funny and nowhere near as painful as it has been in the past.

The evening definitely benefited from several of the journos — Elahe Izadi of National Journal, Natalie McGill of The Nation’s Health and Valerie Paschall of The DCist to name three — having experience moonlighting as standups. That kind of polish is priceless.

However, C-SPAN’s Libby Casey gets a giant virtual high-five from us, because she isn’t a professional funnyman and was pretty hilarious in our opinion. Handling a roomful of reporters and Hill folk can’t be any worse (or any better) than handling C-SPAN callers.

FOX Business News’s Rich Edson amused HOH with a pretty funny imitation of a Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., which then segued into an impression of ex-Vice President Al Gore, making the room full of nerds laugh.

The big newsroom at Politico provided two contestants, Jon Allen and Patrick Reis. Allen was funniest when he was self-deprecating and asked everyone to read his forthcoming book, while Reis, who works on the Politico Pro side, poked at a proverbial hornet’s nest.

And we have to give a special shoutout to CQ Roll Call’s Meredith Shiner: She made us very proud!

There was at least one weird moment at the end of the night when the emcee, Huffington Post’s Brandon Wetherbee, told a roomful of Twitter-happy reporters to stop tweeting the event and to delete tweets so as not to get people in trouble.

In the name of journalism and the First Amendment, we obviously ignored him.